A Sin For Him
by Alchemist Experiment
Summary: He made her weak. But for him she would allow it, because he made her feel human and he tasted like fire. ScarxLust, spoilers.


-1_Disclaimer: Characters are not mine, I am making no money off of this!_

**A Sin For Him**

"You men," Lust muttered, arms crossed beneath her breasts and eyes on the empty street outside the window. "Always so needlessly gallant." The words were spoken with detachment but they were distracted, Lust's mind on other things. She turned from the window and watched her current companion with eyes that were neither warm nor cold. She sighed and knelt beside him, her fingers plucking at the crimson stained cloth of his shirt. She wanted to kiss him, suddenly, as she crouched beside him to inspect his wounds. What an odd impulse.

He said nothing in response to her - what could he? She didn't expect him to answer her, anyway. She frowned as she pulled the torn edges of his shirt away from flesh, tugging as they stuck with the repugnant glue of blood. The wounds were ugly - black and ragged and still oozing red. There was nothing she could do. She didn't even know why she was giving them such attention, but there she was. She pulled off her gloves, the slick silk sliding down her arms to drop like dead birds beside them both. She brushed her fingers lightly across the rawest wound, her ivory pale fingers smudging with blood. His blood.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing." Lust withdrew her fingers. She looked at the blood that clung to them, warm and wet and alive. She had stained herself in his blood before. Without thinking she raised her fingertips to her lips and licked at the blood, catlike and quick. She wanted to taste him, though she didn't really know why. He was watching her. His eyes as red as the stains on her fingers were on her, intent and piercing. His blood tasted like fire. "Does it hurt?" What a silly thing to ask. Of course it hurt. What a _human_ thing to ask. Like the impulse to kiss him, fleeting and insistent and above all human.

"I have felt worse."

Human thoughts still crowded her mind. What was it about this man that changed her so? Why was it in his presence she was something strange and unknown? Oh, she knew in theory. She had the memories, half flashes of a dead life that twined like serpents through the maze of her own reality. But memories were nothing but memories. He called to something else, something flesh.

Lust reached out, her damp fingers brushing aside the hair that fell in his face. It was soft, warm like the rest of him. She felt sand trapped within it, gritty and clinging. She started, suddenly, unaware of the last time she had touched anyone with bare hands. Had she ever? Were the memories of skin under her fingers her own or shards of the woman she had once been? She had known men before, even been loved by men before, but never before had she cared. They were just men, no better or worse than any other. None of them had mattered, and she had watched them all die with little regret. Why, then, did she cling to this one so? Why did she _want_ this one so?

It was not the want of her namesake. The sensual sin of lust was something else entirely, something carved of flesh and heat and sinew. This was not lust, this strange desire that she could not deny. This desire for a man who lay dying beside her, dying _for_ her.

"I have no wish for you to die." She spoke the words quietly, as though that would make them something more than what they were. She did not want to see him dead, see him gone from her life forever. Had she the skill, she would remake him as she herself was. And why not? Dead, half alive and then alive again; there were worse ways to be. A smile crossed her lips as she imagined him as she was, cold and pale and indestructible. He would be a god beside her for a time and she wanted to see that. She supposed that this was close to love as she could know. This want, this desire, this strange and sickening _fear _of his loss.

And what did he mean to her? He was only a man. He wasn't even the man she had once loved. But he was the man that she _wanted_, for whatever reasons. Her fingertips moved down, curling around his cheek and following the line of his jaw to his chin.

"It doesn't matter." He spoke not to her but at her, his eyes watching the space behind her. Lust sighed and folded her legs more tightly beneath her. She dipped her head, raven wings of hair falling against him as she ran her lips over the planes of his broad chest, tasting the blood that was now beginning to dry. She tasted desert wind and moonless nights in his skin. He tensed beneath her but did not pull away, only groaned deeply in his throat. So strong, her Ishbalite hero. She would not see him pass from the world forever. What was it the alchemists believed in? Equivalent exchange. He had offered his life for her who did not need it. What else could she do, really, but return to him what he had so foolishly wasted? They were six now, anyways. She _would_ have him.

She moved up his body, her tongue finding the strong curve of his neck. Was he thinking of her, she wondered? The woman who's name she didn't know but who's face she wore? Was he thinking of his own rapidly approaching death? His brother, long gone from this world and the only reason she herself was living? Or was he thinking of anything at all?

His lips were dry and chapped, kissed harder by the wind than by any woman. But he opened them to her, accepting her kiss with silence. She savored him as he was, alive and warm and moaning quietly into her mouth. Homunculi were cold as death. Did he wish her warm for him? His mouth moved against hers, bruising her. She would give away her dreams of humanity for him, to have him as she knew now she wanted him. She would accept his life - or what life could be given him - instead of her own. A trade, a bargain, there was no need for her to be denied it! God, how foolish, these strange human thoughts that overtook her mind.

She turned her head away, his taste still strong in her mouth. He made her weak and she did not care. For him, she could be weak. She could be foolish. She could be human.

"I do not wish you to die," she said again, her eyes closed as she leaned against him. They were the only words of love she could give him, a poor imitation at best. But they were hers to give and she did not hold them back.

"I accepted my death long ago." He spoke without emotion or pain, simply offering her fact. "And I accepted that I would die alone." Those words softer than the first, spoken with something Lust imagined - or only wished - was tenderness. She kissed him again, fiercely, as though she could offer him life with her lips. Even weak as he was, he returned her kiss with hunger. She held his face in her hands, bare skin on bare skin, reveling in his mouth and the roughness of his cheeks.

"You foolish man," she breathed against his lips and she felt him smile. "Why?"

"I do not regret what I have done. Or what I have gained."

"But what does it matter now?" Lust ran her fingers through his hair, caressing him like a lover. She would have him again, one way or another. Her mind, convoluted as it was, could entertain no other thought. It was a sick sort of irony, that the thing that had been denied them in life was there for them in death.

"Maybe it doesn't. God knows, not I. But I am glad for it, whether it matters or not."

Lust rested her forehead against his, pressing her smooth skin to the rough scar that gave him his name. She curled against him, dismissing his words of god. She knew no god and had no care to. The only god she knew was as flesh and blood as the man beneath her.

"Do you wish I was her?" she asked, needing to know. She met his eyes, searching them as though they could answer her question. He watched her in turn, unreadable and deep in thought. She wished she hadn't asked. It didn't really matter, did it? But still, she needed to know, in her foolish human weakness.

"No," he said finally, and he caught her lips in a soft kiss, almost chaste. She closed her eyes to him, something unknown and tight gripping her deep inside. "No," he said again. "I don't."


End file.
